PLEASE. Make it stop! Here’s a trend I never saw coming through the grime of my computer keyboard. But now that the kid is too fast for me to tie a sponge to her hand, I have to face an unpleasant truth.

New York, perhaps the only place on the planet where tossing Chinese takeout containers into the trash constitutes “doing the dishes,” is under the grips of a new fetish.

It turns out Martha Stewart was onto something. Days after getting sprung from the slammer, she ranted at a press conference like a deranged ’50s housewife about how “homekeeping,” as she calls wifely drudgery, is really a pure expression of love. Now, our city is getting with the program, and is about to go mad for . . . cleaning.

That’s the thing your mother used to do all day, just to make you feel guilty. Well, it’s back and it’s big.

I discovered this the other day when visiting the Upper West Side, where the Oreck vacuum-cleaner and air-purifier people, after 41 years of scouring the suburbs, have summoned the gumption to set up their first-ever shop in Manhattan. This is no mere store.

It turns out, Martha only got the cleaning thing half-right. While she raved about how, say, scrubbing the toilet is a nifty way to say, “I care,” the Oreck folks take things a step further. In written materials, cleanliness is presented as the direct route to happiness.

When it opens tomorrow on 68th and Broadway, the store will hold – I kid you not – upscale after-hours parties where trendy ladies will eat, drink and learn how you can remove permanent marker from wood floors, without even considering selling off the kids.

Bring your friends to these soirees, and a percentage of sales goes either to charity – or toward filling your house with cleaning products.

Is our city ready to go Stepford?

“Well, I do think New Yorkers gotta clean their houses like everybody else,” company founder David Oreck told me. And then, this gifted salesman proceeded to (a) turn my stomach and (b) make me reach for my AmEx.

“Most vacuum cleaners spew dirt into the air. They are utterly unsanitary and unhygienic. People empty these things out in the kitchen and of course . . . ” Enough!

As if on cue, a woman in a full-length mink walked into the soon-to-be-open store. She asked the salesman, “What do you think I need for a little pied-a-terre?”